Spam on forums

[Jesse]

UzZx32QU,

Yes! I know exactly what you’re going through. I run a forum in my spare time. www.artdc.org . I get a ton of spam accounts registering. The usual give away for me is their links. So obvious if they are spammy. I start to really wonder if the Tiny bit of SEO that they get from our pages and forums really helps. It must, or they wouldn’t do it. But it’s necessary to weed out the bogus accounts. I posted a very similar thread on my forum to let those that were axed and were legit to contact me…

At previous posters who suggested questions, I used to offer some login questions, nothing that crazy, but enough to weed out robots. Some how they figured it out. I think there are people that constantly search for forums to spam to improve their SEO… A good strong CAPTCHA has worked the best for me. In the past requiring more complex passwords helped, but then we lost some potential registrations because of that...

 

[Mike Labbe]

Captcha has been cracked/beaten and they use humans now to make the accounts, in many cases.

If you have a vbulletin forum, using spam-o-matic (compares email and ip against stopforumspam.com and akismnet databases of known spammers, watches the first several posts for bad links and content) in conjunction with spammers suck (human verification registration screen timer), vb bad behavior (checks for mischievous scripts), and some industry related questions that are in a random rotation - you'll eliminate 99.99% of them. These are all available on the developer's support forum.

 

[Peter Odems]

Had the same in our previous version of www.mac4dummies.nl

We did an update to newest PUNB and we added 3 questions in Dutch that requires 3 answers in Dutch and a mail-confirmation.

Since we did this we only had one spammer inside. We had many spammers from Eastern Europe, Nigeria and the most used a random gmail-address.